World in their Hands (eBook)

EARLY PIONEERS

SCOTLAND DID NOT send a team to the inaugural Women’s Rugby World Cup, the tournament simply coming too soon in their development. That does not mean, though, that the country played no part in the history of the women’s game. Far from it.

When proposals for the tournament began to be discussed in earnest at the start of 1990, there were only six women’s teams north of the border, all associated with universities. Scotland would not contest a women’s test for another three years, but those clubs were beginning to find their voice.

At a WRFU committee meeting in Loughborough on 13 January 1990, at which Deborah Griffin’s initial plans for a European Cup were first distributed, the Scottish clubs announced their intention, via a letter from Ann Mackay, to form their own league. Up until that point, the six teams had competed as part of the northern section of the WRFU’s Student Cup and came under the jurisdiction of the North of England committee. The cost of travel to matches and distances involved had, though, become prohibitive. Mackay, who was the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College RFC captain, therefore wrote to the committee to inform them that the Scottish teams would be withdrawing from the Student Cup. She requested that they ‘recognise the new Scottish League’.

Minutes from the meeting record that the ‘committee agreed Scottish teams (all college sides at present) should have their own league’. Representatives of the six clubs were also invited to future meetings. It was the first step on the road to the formation not only of a national team but also the Scottish Women’s Rugby Union in 1993. When the WRFU began to disband, to be replaced by individual unions representing England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, it was the Scots who walked away first.

The saltire might have been absent as the World Cup got under way in South Wales in April 1991, but it is possible to trace the origin of the competition’s story all the way back to Scotland. Hundreds of years before football enjoyed a renaissance at English public schools and was co-opted as a barometer of manliness and split into Association and Rugby rules, there is evidence to suggest that women in parts of Scotland were avid players. Certainly, on 21 August 1628, Mr John Lindsay, a Church of Scotland minister in the village of Carstairs, is recorded as being appalled by ‘the break of the Sabbath by the insolent behaviour of men and women in footballing, dancing and Barley Breaks’.

Games of football had been played in the UK since at least the time of the Romans and became a popular pastime to celebrate festivals, such as Shrove Tuesday (or Fastern’s E’en as it was known in Scotland). Matches were huge amorphous affairs which pitted sections of towns (e.g., those who lived on opposite sides of a river, or married men and bachelors) or villages against one another. The aim of these contests was simple: to gain possession of a round object, the football, and propel it, although usually not with the foot, towards a target. These goals might be miles apart, and therefore the fun could last from dawn until dusk without one being scored.

It was not uncommon for these matches to leave a trail of damaged property and broken limbs, and football therefore aroused the suspicion of the authorities. Playing of it was banned in London by Edward II in 1314, and several monarchs over the succeeding centuries issued similar proclamations. Under Henry VIII, it became a penal offence to keep a house or ground designated for football, but that did not do much to quell the sport’s popularity. Indeed, 28 years after the incident in Carstairs, a minister in nearby Lamington wrote of ‘one superstitious and abominable custom that has continued still in the parish, that men and women used promiscuously to play at foot-ball upon Fasting’s even’.

It is in Scotland, too, that the first accounts of women playing against each other (rather than alongside men) are documented. On Tuesday 26 November 1889, the Berwickshire News and General Advertiser carried an article about a female football match in Coldstream on Ash Wednesday 1786. Under the subheading ‘Petticoats Run Mad: or, The World Turned Topsy-turvey’, the paper cites the Berwick Museum as its source of information for a match ‘played with uncommon keenness’ in which ‘caps, handkerchiefs, petticoats, and every other article of female attire, suffered a general wreck in the hardy contest’. Darkness enveloped the players before a result could be determined, and so the women did the honourable thing and retired to an ale house.

Although the article suggests the teams returned to the pitch on Easter Monday, the Coldstream match seems likely to have been a one-off event. Around 45 miles further north, though, there is evidence that women were playing regularly. Not much is known about the game contested by the fisherwives of Fisherrow Harbour. Writing in his Old Statistical Account of Scotland in 1795, Dr Alexander Carlyle dedicates only 23 words to it: ‘On Shrove Tuesday there is a standing match at foot-ball, between the married and unmarried women, in which the former are always victors’. The last seven of those words, however, would suggest that this was an annual contest.

The fact that the married women are ‘always victors’ has been seen by some as evidence that the best player on the team of spinsters won themselves a husband and thus bolstered the opposition for the next year’s contest. Such practices did exist, but what we know about the fisherwives suggests they did not readily conform to gender norms. ‘They do the work of men, their manners are masculine, and their strength and activity is equal to their work. Their amusements are of the masculine kind’, Carlyle writes, adding that they used their free time to play golf as well as football. Four days a week, it was the women’s job to carry the catch from the harbour’s fishing boats to market in Edinburgh. When those vessels came in late, it would not be ‘unusual for them to perform their journey of five miles, by relays, three of them being employed in carrying one basket, and shifting it from one to another every hundred yards, by which means they have been known to arrive at the Fishmarket in less than 1/4 ths of an hour.’ A gruelling endeavour, yes, but one that highlighted the women’s physical prowess and would have honed the skills and teamwork needed for the annual football match.

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As the industrial revolution changed Britain, and people flocked from villages to the new cities in search of work, so the playing of folk football matches began to decline. The article carried by the Berwickshire News and General Advertiser in 1889 suggests that ‘the ancient game of football, which seems to be neglected by the men of the present age, is likely to be handed down to posterity by the women’. Of course, there is a simple reason why this might have been true. The new forms of football developed in the English public schools provided men with a simpler and more regular outlet for their footballing passions. They didn’t have to wait for Shrove Tuesday to tumble about with the rest of their village. Now they could head down to Rectory Field or Whalley Range on a Saturday, provided they had the right social connections, and take part in a contest which would last no longer than a couple of hours and not, unless something went wrong, impact on their ability to work.

However, these new football codes (whether Association, Rugby or indeed Australian rules) were designed explicitly for men; in rugby’s case, a specific type of man. So, where did this leave women? As we have seen, evidence exists of the enthusiasm some women and girls had for football. A young servant and four female friends were found guilty by magistrates in the Lincolnshire town of Horncastle on Christmas Eve, 1813 of playing the game on the Sabbath. However, as the century progressed, Victorian views on what constituted ‘lady-like’ behaviour generally became more conservative. Popularised by predominantly male medical theorists, women began to be valued more and more for their ability to bear children. Any endeavours considered detrimental to their reproductive organs (whether mental or physical) were discouraged.

In 1894, the British Medical Journal released a paper on reports that ‘female football clubs will shortly contest in public’. Noting that ‘woman seems now to have a task before her in which we fear greatly she will fail’, the article repeated many of the tropes which had come to dominate the debate on female participation in sport. ‘If girls choose to kick a ball about a field between their lessons no one need object, but for young women to attempt to play at football as played is another matter. Many of the sudden jerks and twists involved in the game are exactly such as are known to cause serious internal displacements, and it is impossible to think what happens when the arms are thrown up to catch the ball, or when a kick is made with full force, and misses, without admitting the injury which may be thereby produced in the inner mechanism of the female frame. Nor can one overlook the chances of injury to the breast.’

Such attitudes were not uncommon in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) a publication which 16 years previously had featured an ‘extensive correspondence’ on whether it was safe for a menstruating woman to cure meat. The BMJ’s objections appear to have been raised this time by the formation of the British Ladies Football Club, a female Association team set up with the help of Nettie Honeyball. However, the journal’s outrage at women’s football came at least 13 years too...